Blog Post #2: Week 6

Welcome to the second blog post! Since the first blog post, we did a couple of things with our app. First, we added Firebase to our app. We did this by making a new project on Firebase and connecting it to our app through the Firebase website. We followed the directions on the site that included putting in the android package name and the SHA-1 key, downloading and inserting the google-services.json file into our app in android studio, adding the provided code to the build.gradle files to add the Firebase SDK, syncing the changes, and finally running the app to complete the process. We are going to use Firebase to store the top users' scores.

We then created the UI for the start screen when the user opens the app. The start screen includes a text view for the title of the app, which is "Ham Radio Simulator", and a start, about, and leaderboard button. When the buttons were added to the start screen using android studio on one of the computers in the Olin lab, the leaderboard button was not cut off and was in its proper place. However, that is not the case when I run the app on my computer, which is where the screenshot on the left is from. Therefore, we need to change our app so that the buttons are shown correctly on every screen, no matter the size.


Another feature that was added was the about screen. When the user presses the about button on the start screen, they are taken to the screen on the right. The about screen tells the users what the purpose of the app is and who developed the app.